LinkedIn article The 8-Hour Workday Doesn’t Really Work provides some history of our 8 hour day and attempts to update it with a few examples of managing productivity through understanding human nature.
It’s not an exhaustive look at productivity solutions although it addresses qualitative inputs associated with the ratio of output to inputs in production.
Industrial aged ideals around productivity and education continue to burden us today. I’m looking forward to a congruent update.
Telling Tales from floraGo on Vimeo.
This is a practice recording of a Seattle Pecha Kucha presentation given at the Bellevue art Museum on November 1st, 2013. The theme was Telling Tales.
Explore Now is a concept about connecting people with experiences.
The concept combines the digital and physical worlds through a videoconferencing service that connects people in the cloud to mobile physical world guides who take them to the places they want, similar to the way a guide for local tourism or a personal shopper would.
By facilitating real- world experiences the service creates a new market within a billion dollar industry combining entertainment, shopping and tourism for economic, cultural, and social benefit.
Today we can join a live event through stationary cameras, but what missing is visual control of the surroundings and interactive engagement. While online shopping allows us to navigate through websites, the experience is impersonal.
Explore Now allows virtual guests to guide where they go, what to look at, and interactions. Guides could be wearing a device that has a camera, for example glasses, or using a hand held device.
There are many different ways to productize the concept, below are 2 simple Grandma Scenarios for shopping and tourism.
Note- these are draft scenarios with poorly design UI’s as placeholders.
This concept has been percolating for 10 years. I know it will happen and is happening to some extent now. I want to be a part of connecting people with these new experiences.
See the Explore Now draft business plan for more details. Contact Flora for interest.
I expect a lot from smart phones and am continually let down. The platform I require needs to feel generous and facilitate belonging; this will deliver phone Joy. Unfortunately phone Joy is currently unavailable, so I am split I’m split between the 2.
It’s been 1 month and 3 days since I made the switch from my Windows phone to an iPhone and I am NOT feeling the love. Specifically the iPhone interface does not feel generous. Surprisingly, the UI changes made since my last iPhone 3 or 4 years ago are minimal. I expected more.
I made the current switch to an iPhone after much whining about how the Windows phone lacks most of the popular social apps. I would be jealous seeing my loved ones Snap Chatting without me. I felt left out and wanted to belong to their joy; goofy and otherwise.
Even though the Windows phone misses the connection to the communal matrix, the interface is lovely: the tiles, list views, and sweeping transitions. Yeah, there are small things I don’t like including how it cuts off text; but the overall experience feels generous.
Meanwhile the experience of getting to the social apps on the iPhone is crammed, underwhelming, and dare I say archaic. It’s just too utilitarian for today. And what’s been happening is I find that I’m reaching for the iPad mini (which is a much better form factor for the Apple UI, although still archaic) to answer FaceTime, a message, or look at Path… What’s a Grandma to do?
So, I’m back to reevaluating what matters most.
Here is where I’ve landed. While I can’t have all in one phone Joy, I can split my requirements between multiple devices. The iPad mini, provides all the social apps. So have decided I don’t need 2 devices with this mediocre experience and am in the market for a new phone with a generous interface. I’m tempted by the Android or should I go back to the Windows phone? Either way, it looks like one of my kids is going to see a new/hand me down iPhone in their future.
…
Update- I got the Nokia Lumia 1020 with Windows.
Governing a digital society needs careful thought as each action may have unintended consequences. Case in point: Site Wide Automated Moderation (SWAM) on LinkedIn.
I have enjoyed LinkedIn, especially participating in the group discussions around topics and links to articles of interest. Unfortunately I was removed and blocked from a group; the result had cascading effects across all the other groups I am associated with. I had been SWAM’d.
SWAM flips a switch that restricts a person from freely making comments within ALL the groups they are a member of. There is no undo switch. The restriction may be lifted per group by each group owner. In theory that sounds ok, however try getting an owner of a group with more than a few hundred members to bother, much less those who have thousands, or hundreds of thousands. It’s just not practical to expect individual attention.
A group owner has every right to block an individual from their group. However, allowing a single group owner to SWAM a person without verification of an offense having taken place, puts a lot of power on a single group owner. It turns that owner into a dictator, knowingly or not.
I was given no warning; my freedom of speech was all of a sudden gone. In my efforts to get to the cause of my SWAMing I found it was done in error. The LinkedIn customer support is very polite although they can’t do anything to fix the problem because the system is broken. There is (currently) no graceful recovery.
This is just one tiny example of potential tyranny within digital societies.
In fairness, we have to remember that we are just at the beginning of digital societies and there are likely going to be a lot of mistakes. In fixing our mistakes, our collective interest should be in what is best for society, digital and physical. I vote for a democracy.
Meanwhile I curse the system for making the LinkedIn society much less useful than it used to be.
Addendum 11/26
I joined a linked in SWAM support group and as a way of introducing myself to the group I posted a link to this story, the first comment I received stated no BLOGVURTISING. Great support, I am really not feeling the love on LinkedIn.
My father, Eaton K. Goldthwaite, was a story teller. One of my favorite stories was from 1927.
He was in a band while going to Columbia and they played at different speakeasies around New York City. One night they were playing at a lonely hearts club when the place was raided and the cops took everyone to the station in the paddy wagon. All but my father that is, because with all the people already in the wagon, his drum kit wouldn’t fit. So, on his honor he took the subway to the police station.
The subway was crowded so he placed his drum kit between the cars and jumped into the train. As the train was pulling out of the station, my father watched as a man with an umbrella chased the train down the platform trying to poke holes in the snare drum. Happily, no holes were poked. And yes my father turned himself in.
Last night my husband was playing DJ Rashad’s Double Cup album. It reminded me that if we want to stay relevant, whether it’s in business or society, we should stretch outside our comfort zones now and again.
Music is a language of culture. It represents the sentiments of the time and place it was created. Music that comes from the edges of our ethos is foretelling of changes to come in the mainstream.
My husband invited me to dance to one of the songs. Double Cup is in the footwork genre, which to me sounds like a combo of techno, hip-hop and ghetto house music. Its contrasting groove sucked me right in. My husband, being the font of all knowledge, also had search results open on Tumblr for “double cup”. It showed mixed media, most included styrofoam cups, sprite, and codeine cough syrup. Not being familiar with the term I looked it up.
While Rashad’s Double Cup will rub many people the wrong way it is a provocative and good listen. It has strong language that is lewd and disrespectful. It’s about things I abhor although am drawn to. It’s right, and not right.
Cultural context gives us the difference between polite and offensive speech. And not being from the Double Cup culture (if there is such a thing) I’m unclear if any offense is suggested. It does however beg questions and brings the movie The Gods Must be Crazy to mind. Where the story follows a coke bottle that falls from an airplane into a culture secluded from the larger world; it brings joy, chaos and violence.
I’m not saying Double Cup will have the same effect on the mainstream. Or that we’re going to be drinking dirty sprite at our local cocktail lounge. Yet getting high continues to be a theme in modern western society. Escapism is mainstream and we continue to be creative about how we do it. Beyond new ways to get high, the point is that ideas morph and spread. Wandering to the edges to see what’s up often shows us innovative ways to meet a culture’s needs.
Will this help keep us relevant? If we don’t jump over the fence now and again we’ll never know.
We had much sadness today. Our neighbor, Marica the dog, was being put down at 12:30 and my plan was to be away during the process to distract me from thinking about her. She had cancer.
Just as I was leaving I saw through the window Marica with her family out on their porch saying their final goodbyes. My initial reaction had me turn around quickly and go into the kitchen; wanting to avoid the devastation. Getting a grip I spun back around and headed out in spite of myself. I headed and across the street for my final goodbye.
The mom was taking pictures of Marica as she wiped away tears. Her 11 year old was close by her side crying. The youngest, who is 8, was separated from the others leaning over the railing a bearable distance away. The youngest raised his hand and waved; it was an awkward wave, one filled with confusion about how to be in this circumstance. The vet whisked by me and into the house. The dad was inside waiting for all to return. The scene was Real.
I gave the closest ones a hug and pet Marica, telling her we loved her. Then I briskly walked to my car and drove off. Crying off course…
On my errands I would intermittently tear up as I thought about a boy and his dog. A boy and his dog is a phrase that we all own. It’s a phrase that speaks to the relationship we have with our pets; they are our friends, they are loved ones.
First world observation….
Designing to 3 screen sizes is a popular theme (phone, tablet, PC). How about designing to 3 different devices being used at the same time and in different ways?
In example, I have found myself 3 times in the last 24 hours using 3-4 screens attached to different devices/OS’s at the same time for different purposes.
Situation 1: FaceTiming on our iPad mini, while searching for event tickets on my laptop, and talking to someone on the phone.
Situation 2: Watching a show streaming from Amazon on our big screen, while sitting on the couch playing solitaire on the iPad, and texting on my windows phone. I look over to the husband who is on both his iPhone and Nexus pad at the same time as well. Yes, we are a privileged and OS blended family ;o)
Situation 3: Skyping on my laptop, while emailing on the iPad and pressing ignore on an incoming call.
Chaos much?
Makes me think of a favorite quote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”- Simone Weil
August block party
1 family reunion at our house
2 nieces’ weddings
3 trips to Eastern Washington
4 overnights to islands
5 different kinds of watercraft, floating with others
6 live shows
7 potlucks
8 outdoor fire circles
9 hosted events
11 people sleeping in our house at once
X dining out
18 overnight guests in total
23 days with the little family from Lisbon
We ended it last night in style with ice cream for dinner after a day of movie watching.